Holy Places
by ulstergirl
Summary: Missing scene from all things, between Scully falling asleep on the couch and leaving Mulder's apartment the next morning. UST.


When Scully blinked awake, she shifted and leather groaned underneath her.

_Leather._

Scully reached up and ran a hand over her face and wrinkled brow, sighing. Rough heavy blanket over her. She was hot, her head was pounding, and she could hear the aerator from the dimly glowing fish tank, visible just beyond her bare toes.

Pantyhose. The elastic had twisted around her waist. She glanced to the side, but caught no gleam of answering eyes in the dark, before she kicked the blanket off and struggled out of her pantyhose, tossing them in the direction of her purse.

From the other room, a muffled shrill laugh track sounded. Three o'clock in the morning. Mulder was still on vacation, his crop circles having failed to materialize. When they were on cases she had grown accustomed to the sound of it, a muffled drone from behind their adjoining doors, while she did sleep and he attempted it, still poring over the casefile, wearing himself out. He probably had succeeded by now. She wouldn't bother poking her head in and disturbing him enough to tell him goodbye.

She crept across the floor on bare toes and shrugged into her jacket, pantyhose in a ball in the pocket, slipped her purse strap over her shoulder.

A glass clinked behind the bedroom door.

She kept her keyring quiet in her palm as she found the key to his apartment, her shoes in her hand. The floor was cool under her toes and she headed for the door, pulled it open.

The hallway was dark.

She stood in the doorway. Because it was late and she was still half-asleep and drowsy, and she woke remembering the warmth of his shoulder under her cheek and finding only his couch instead; because of all those things she stood and forgot the shoes in her hand and the fact that it was very early in the morning and she under any other circumstances would have been gone hours ago, and instead remembered, two years ago.

The taste of an almost-kiss on her lips, the sudden paralyzing shock of the bee sting.

She blinked slowly, until she knew that she was awake and not in the golden light of a soft summer afternoon. She had tasted him since then, but not that kiss. Not that same kiss. Strained by fear and longing, the expression in his eyes. She had seen that look since then, but it was dimmed by fluorescents and business suits and the knowledge that their partnership would be threatened if she acknowledged or answered it.

That bee-stung almost-kiss had happened while she was sure she would be leaving, and that kiss, for all its repercussions, would not be the victim of an awkward morning in their burnt shell of an office. She wouldn't have to see his face every day and wonder if she had made the right decision. She would give in and it would be over. She would know, and if their paths diverged, so much the better.

Now, she was his partner. Again. And in this seeming endless trail of days, marked only by his latest outlandish theories and insane leaps of logic, their relationship left no room for any of that speculation. Not anymore. She had too much to lose.

She closed her eyes and heard the scrape of a bare sole across the floor in another cool room and knew that in this moment she was making her choice. She could walk out, lock the door behind her, go back to her cold and lonely apartment, the sight she had come here to avoid, but she would be safe, and he would never know about this sudden wild impulse, the desire to take the road they had studiously avoided since that day. Or she could just stand here. His hand rattling the doorknob. She took a long, slow breath.

And then he was standing in the doorway of his bedroom. Golden light spilling at his bare feet. He was in jeans, his chest bare, his hair rumpled; his hazel eyes were blurred with fatigue and the alcohol she could only barely smell, but bright with the same high thin intensity that made profiles so effortless and sleep so elusive.

"Scully?"

She closed the door.

--

"How many have you had?"

"Why, you want to catch up?"

A single highball glass, a bucket of ice, a pitcher of water; these were the props of the evening. The shape and size and color of the bottle sometimes changed but tonight it was familiar and amber and very, very smooth going down. She stood at the foot of his bed, blocking his view of the badly edited and overdubbed movie he had almost been watching.

Watching between the moments he remembered that his partner was sleeping two feet away from him, separated only by a wall and cloth and skin.

"Maybe one."

She slipped on bare feet over the floor, heading for the kitchen, when he reached out and linked his fingers around her wrist, holding her back. "I'll get you a glass."

He could still feel her pulse beating beneath his fingertips when he headed to the kitchen, searching the cupboards for a clean glass. He had a shot glass somewhere, one that hadn't been broken against a wall or cracked from being slammed down on a tabletop, but it eluded him. His fingertips were tingling, the numb sensation wearing off as he gave his other highball glass a quick rinse under the tap and carried it back to his bedroom, his fingers curled around it. Only once he was looking down at the floor, the corner of the blanket hanging off the couch, in the dim blue light, did he think that maybe she would want something else. He surveyed his bar and selected a third-full bottle of vodka before he stumbled his way back to his bed.

Where she was.

Green shirt hugging her curves, black skirt sliding up above her knees, cream-smooth legs with ankles crossed above the comforter. She looked up when he entered. "Isn't there anything else on?"

He shrugged, putting the glass down on the bedside table. The other videos he kept in here... he shook his head, a half-smile on his lips. "No idea," he admitted.

She took the vodka and the other glass, poured herself a generous couple of fingers before dropping in a pair of half-melted ice cubes. "All right," she said. "I guess you'll just have to entertain me."

"Entertain," he almost repeated, but his voice was threatening to give out.

They had been together at bars. When the cases were too much and the monsters too fierce, when they hit dead end after dead end, when she was at the end of her rope and he wasn't far behind, and there could be no conclusion, no closure, only temporary abstraction. He drank until his fingertips were numb, until she had finished off his vodka and the room became too bright and too hot to keep either the bedside lamp or his jeans on. Even then, he couldn't say what he was thinking, what he thought every time her blue eyes caught his in the strobed light of the television set. He limited himself to sly mumbled comments and knew that he wasn't making sense anymore, and then knew that he was making more sense than he ever did while awake or sober. It all led somewhere, it all had to lead somewhere, he told her, and he knew from the expression in her eyes and everything she'd said while they sat on his couch earlier. She knew. Even if she didn't always agree or completely understand. She knew. She had to know.

"Mulder, it's all right." She waved off his unsteady offer of his own amber bottle. "It does have to lead somewhere. For both of us. The truth you... we... what we want, but it's bigger than that, it's..."

She swept her arms out, and he caught her hand, gazing at her even as he attempted, and missed, putting the amber bottle back on the table. They both heard the dull thump as it struck the floor, but their fingers, their skin. Her voice had trailed off countless heartbeats before.

There were a thousand good reasons not to obey the sudden impulse. He couldn't think of a single one, but he swallowed anyway, and looked away.

And saw her legs, washed in sterile blue light. The skirt had ridden up to her hips. She had been wearing pantyhose before. She wasn't now. Numb with liquor. He could blame it later. He had to blame something for this, because after six years and a thousand other opportunities, why tonight. Why now.

He couldn't bring himself to look at her face as he let his right hand come to rest on her knee. His fingers wrapping around, to rest on the smooth soft flesh, the tensed cord of muscle. In the hard buzz of his head he waited for a response. Waited for her to slap him, to unobtrusively roll away from him and walk out of his apartment without another word.

She had to do something. Because if she didn't, his was the next move to make, and he didn't trust himself. Not now. Not in the dim blue-shaded hours he knew all too well. They were on borrowed time.

She didn't move. All she did was swallow.

When his voice finally came back, it was low, almost hoarse. "It's late," he said, but he didn't move his hand.

She was quiet until he found the strength to look into her face, and at her expression he remembered another time he'd come far too close to crossing the line, and his ability to resist this was eroding with her every breath. She wasn't closing off. He walked his fingertips up until they were barely resting against the edge of her skirt, and she wasn't sliding out from under him, wasn't leaving.

Obviously he'd had too much to drink and she was humoring him. Or she wasn't here at all, and the liquor had just eased him into an especially realistic dream.

In the same moment he dipped his face to hers, she leaned forward, and their lips met.

--

He tasted like liquor and it burned against her tongue.

She ran her fingers through his hair and he was pushing her skirt up with the back of his hand. Her skin was smooth and he had seen her in less, she had seen him in less, but she could clearly feel each beat of her heart and Mulder's fingers were curving around the edge of her panties.

"God," she gasped when he pulled back, her eyelashes fluttering. His lips were swelled from her kiss when he hooked his fingers under the hem of her shirt and tugged. She leaned forward and raised her arms and as he pulled her top over her head she rose onto her knees, and when he tossed it to the floor to join his jeans she lowered her face to his, until their lips were a hair's breadth apart, their breath mingling.

He closed the distance in the space of a heartbeat and she put her arms around his neck. She felt slight against him. The hard lean muscle of his chest, the expression in his heavily lashed eyes. This kiss was lazy and slow and she traced her fingers down his cheek, letting them linger there when he pulled back again.

"Scully..."

She slipped her thumb over his lower lip and he raised his eyes to gaze into hers. He tilted his face again, leaning in so close, and she was the one to bridge the distance, as she had longed to do that afternoon in his hallway. She was kissing him.

It wasn't enough to wonder. She had to know. They had lost so much and in a moment of carefully considered vulnerability she had asked him to return a part of that which their quest had taken from her. She had asked him to help her by fathering a child. There had been none, there had been no relief to this emptiness. Maybe by now she would have been establishing her own practice, seeing Daniel on the weekends, able to see Melissa...

She closed her eyes and he buried his hand in her hair, renewing the kiss as she slumped against the headboard. He unbuttoned her skirt and she pulled back to struggle out of it, her breasts brushing against his chest, color staining her cheeks. It was the vodka talking. Vodka and the disappointment she hadn't even been able to express to him, when she found out it hadn't worked and never would. She would carry none of him with her.

He saw the tear slide from the inner corner of her eye, following the hollow beneath her lower lid until it started a track down her cheek. She leaned forward to him again, but he framed her face with his palms and studied her eyes.

"This is... actually happening, right? I mean, I'm not..."

She dipped her head in silent confirmation, his fingers sliding over the curve of her cheek. She placed her hands over his. "Yes," she said.

He shook his head, then. She could almost feel his gaze as it caught the slight fabric stretched over her hips and breasts, and she could feel the scarred raised skin marking the snake at the small of her back. He was her partner and if she shrugged out of her bra, if she acted on the attraction it was now clear they shared...

"We can't," he breathed.

"Because everyone already thinks we are?"

Her voice was tight and hard and he dragged his gaze to her face, his brow already furrowed. "I don't give a damn about what anyone else thinks."

"Then why," she said, keeping her voice even.

"Because I need to know this is real," he said slowly. "Because I need to know this isn't just..."

He trailed off and she took his chin in her hand, forcing his gaze back to hers. He closed his eyes and she sighed, in frustration and disappointment. "That this isn't what?"

"A few too many drinks and an old flame," he said.

"Do you honestly think," she began, and shook her head. "My God, Mulder."

"I can't lose you," he said, so low she could barely hear him.

"You won't lose me," she said, tracing her thumbs over his lower lip again. She leaned forward and brushed her lips over his. "You won't."

He took her wrists in his hands and held them, lightly. "We have to stop," he said slowly, and kissed her again, slow and hard. "We have to stop."

"Why," she whispered, closing her eyes.

He slipped his arms around her and pulled her into his lap, resting his chin against the crown of her head. "Because I love you too much," he said.

Three hours later she slipped from his bed, picking up her skirt and sweater. Mulder had finally drifted off, but she had stayed awake, in his arms, watching the blinds slowly grow more distinct with the coming dawn, as the alcohol bled away. She met her own gaze in the mirror above his bathroom sink as she pulled her top back on.

It was real. Whatever was between them, it was real, and it wasn't over.

She pressed a kiss against his cheek and locked the door behind her, her feet still bare.


End file.
